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I enjoyed that book... but it's a little late to tell people in 2023 to read it.
I am a person from 2023! It wasn't too late!
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That sounds like a very convoluted plan to sabotage your own IP. The theory of the "failure" of 4e that I always found plausible is that the designers chose what seemed to be the right numbers for satisfying tactical combat, but they hugely underestimated how inefficient the average new group trying the game would be, so they gave everything lots of HPs, and players got frustrated that their combats took three hours and abandoned the game.
Honestly, it sounds like you're looking for an inelegant solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist. There is, arguably, a problem: it's a lot of work to be a good GM. Especially when you have players who just want to be invested in a story. Creative, imaginative, players make more work for the GM, because they're harder to please than loot-goblins. Running an old-school game where the characters are trying to find gold in dungeons is a lot easier than one where I have to track factions, plan set-piece battles with complex goals, develop complex NPCs, plant secrets and clues, or whatever it is I think will keep the players happy. Now, a lot of GMs are strongly motivated and excited to be creating their great narrative adventure (whether sandbox or linear). But sometimes I'm tired and burned out, and it would be much less work for me if the players just wanted to plunder the hoard of the lizard-king. XP for gold makes it clear that's the kind of game you're running. You have a simple goal, and the story is whatever happens along the way.
Mundane items aren't really the issue. Some Pathfinder adventures make you (for example) fight a bunch of ogres all with +1 ogre hooks. And you're expected to sell these for half price, and use the money to buy things you can actually use. If you gave full XP for that, they'd level up really fast. If you gave no XP for that, they'd barely level up at all. So I'd probably give half value XP for magic items in this situation. Though if you're doing a sandbox, you could just tweak the amount of treasure as you go, to adjust the rate of levelling to whatever feels right for your adventure. A treasure chest could equally contain 100gp or 10000gp...
Pathfinder adventures usually contain the 'correct' amount of treasure to keep you at WBL, so making that be how you measure level progress would presumably work reasonably well. Though Pathfinder assumes you'll lose some potential WBL by selling items at half price - if you're giving them XP as the full value of items found, that would probably make them level up faster than intended. And they will occasionally give you a legendary artefact item at a low level - not sure how you'd handle that. But I wouldn't recommend doing this for an Adventure Path at all. The whole point of treasure->XP was that it allowed you to run a campaign with minimal story, just a goal of finding loot in dungeons while trying to avoid danger. (For that kind of game, if you rewarded the party primarily for killing monsters, it would become a game about seeking out danger, rather than one about caution.)
I have an AD&D first edition DMG from 1979, and I think even Gygax agreed it had a lot of complexity that should never have been added. For example, the Non-lethal and Weaponless Combat Procedures section, which has rules for pummelling, grappling and overbearing attacks, with lots of little modifiers like +5% to base score to hit per 10% height difference, -10% if opponent is braced, -10% if your opponent is wearing a gorget and helmet...
The meaning of Old School in the OSR context isn't entirely agreed upon, but it's broadly about trying to recreate the feel of 1970s RPGs (often with tidied up rules and complexity stripped out). The emphasis is on survival, not grand heroic narratives. Matthew Finch's four pillars of OSR:
Since Pathfinder is exactly the type of thing OSR is trying to get away from, calling it Old School would create confusion. D&D 5.5e hasn't moved all that far away from Pathfinder in terms of how it plays - powerful PCs, maps with 5-foot grids, level-appropriate challenges, etc. So I'd categorise them both as Modern-D20 style.
Shirota's been dead for about 61 years, plus he's an Amatatsu, so he shouldn't have a lot of living relatives (apart from Ameiko).
Better, sure, but that's the GM's half of the conversation you're improving, which is outside of the control of the player who started the thread.
If I was running the game, I would be open to a player taking a minute to deal with it in the moment: Player: I Aid. 19.
He's a jiang-shi vampire who is fighting against a prophecy involving Ameiko. In my game, during book 5, between any two mini-adventures, the party were sent to meet up with Ameiko on Mount Kumijinja, on the Ikkaku Peninsula, to witness a mysterious ritual where a mysterious being called "Lord Jakabu" guides the drowned dead to the next life. The party arrived, bought traditional masks (onu, tengu, kappa, kistune, hyottoko). They bought snacks, watched a play, and ran into a couple of the boss villains, who were there in disguise, and one of the party got temporarily trapped in a mysterious maze of cherry blossoms. Lord Jakabu (google him) turned out to be a flying whale kaiju coming out of the sea. During the ceremony, the torchlit procession leading him up the mountain was disrupted by a Control Weather ritual, and by some jiang-shi vampires trying to enter the local firework factory with lit torches. The party fought them and a giant ghost squid at the same time. Trying to track down the culprit, they travelled to a nearby cursed village ("No-one goes to Chissoku.") beset by famine, rumored to be the place where the Jiang-Shi come from. There, the party met a Gashadokuro. From there they travelled to a haunted graveyard. They fought a Jinmenju tree and a Danse Macabre. They released a chained Raiju that was part of how Shirota called down the storm to extinguish the torches. Finally they battled Shirota in his crypt. (He didn't put up much of a fight.)
It has been Mentioned in the past. I can't remember what I did about it. It's a fairly low impact item, unless you have an alchemist who can re-use potions, which I didn't at the time. (I did have one later, which became a problem when I plugged in the Ruby Phoenix Tournament and it gave my party a potion of Stoneskin.) If the rules violation bothers you, replace the potion with an Elixir of Divine Favor (does the same thing but costs double the price) or replace it with a Potion of Bull's Strength, or just pretend it doesn't exist and treat it like he has those bonuses from his natural skills.
Pretty much everyone worth talking to speaks Common, so it shouldn't make that much difference if your PCs didn't learn Skald.
I ran it with the plug-ins too. (Skipping some of the Road to Destiny encounters.) Since I wasn't tracking XP, it did lead to slow levelling at some points. My players understood why and accepted it. I dropped all caravan mechanics and never regretted it.
If nobody answered, that's probably because the answer was "No". I'd never heard of that archetype, and there aren't that many people running Jade Regent. Looking at the link: Frozen Shadow Ninja - none of those abilities seem like they'd make the ninja more effective in the context where you meet them. They don't need Endure Elements or faster tracking. And they have to give up Uncanny Dodge, which is (somewhat) useful. Levelling: I just did it when it felt right. It's not such a linear adventure that you can place it at an exact point. I had my party reach level 5 after their heist on the Rimerunners Guildhouse (which might have been a bit late - consider doing it when they find Helgarval), and level 6 after clearing the upper part of Ravenscraeg.
Old thread on always getting a reflex save. Paralyzed/helpless creatures are treated as having a Dex of zero, which means they're worse at reflex saves. You could apply a similar effect here, but it would be a house rule.
Going by the book, you always get a save, even when it makes very little sense. A GM might rule-of-cool it and make the creature fail its save automatically, but that does raise issues of consistency - can the wizard save if he's still trapped inside the creature? What about someone who's asleep? What about someone in a narrow corridor with nothing to hide behind?
New PF1 campaign: I'm currently trying to run one that is pretty much the opposite of everything I normally do. Instead of an AP, it's a homebrew hexcrawl. Instead of being over-prepared and ready for every possible thing the players will do, I'm giving them freedom to set their own goals. I'm limiting the characters - no flight, no teleportation - so not every problem can be solved with magic. Every monster in this part of the world is a previously undiscovered species, so knowledge skills don't tell the players much. Instead of making every intelligent creature speak common so I can give them dialogue, NPCs speak completely unknown languages that must be individually learned. Instead of prepping all 'random' encounters in advance for maximum drama, variety, and game balance, I'm rolling on wandering monster tables as the party explores. Instead of ignoring all the mundane details to focus on big narrative action, food is important and in short supply, and hours in the day must be used wisely if you want to rest safely. Rating the experience so far (from a GM perspective; the players seem happy enough, but they were happy with my version of Jade Regent too): My original goal was to have a game that I could run without prepping heavily for every session so I'd feel less overworked. It was probably a mistake to decide that all monsters should be new species that I'd create myself, since creating sixty different creatures for different locations/biomes that the players might choose to visit is a massive amount of work up front. Similarly, I need to create interesting things for them to find no matter where they go, and because I'm using random tables I need to create more than I actually need. I'm trying to reduce my workload by turning to AI. ChatGPT is pretty good for creating filler content - "Give me a list of 20 things the party might find in the forest I described." However, I have to go through everything it creates and sanity check it. It's also fairly bland and vague, but I can use my own creativity to make it more interesting. It's also able to output Pathfinder stat-blocks - "Generate a new Pathfinder 1e CR2 forest monster with a spell-like ability and an unusual weakness" - that kind of thing. Again, you have to sanity check it all, so it's still a lot of work.
Probably. All those rules for full attacks are presumably written under the assumption you're in the normal situation where you only have one move action. There might not even have been a way to get an extra move action when those rules were written. There are certainly exceptions where you can move and full attack: Pummeling Charge, to pick a random example.
If you want to create a bandit gang trying to kill the party, it can make sense: For them, it's kill or be killed. If they're defeated, even if the party spare the bandits and hand them over to the authorities for a trial, they'll almost certainly be hanged (assuming we're operating under a pre-modern justice system). They could try to rob you and spare your life, but leaving living witnesses is asking for trouble. Most of the party's wealth will be hidden about their person in the form of potions, gems, masterwork daggers, or whatever; running away with a random bag of gold isn't anywhere near as profitable as taking everything. The still leaves the issue that the bandits, if they're CR-appropriate, would probably realise pretty quickly that they were out of their league and run for it, but that's an issue with most enemies who aren't mindless undead or insanely loyal assassins.
5e sets you up for illusory difficulty. Running out of HP isn't as dangerous as it sounds. Instead of going into a death spiral, someone casts Healing Word as a bonus action and you're right back into combat. Secondly, the difficulty balance is a mess. It's almost impossible to know whether something will be a fair challenging encounter. The only reliable way to make a combat exciting is to leave yourself some wiggle room. Maybe the enemy gets its HP total adjusted on the fly. Maybe you fudge some dice. Maybe there are enemy reinforcements who turn up sooner or later or not at all, depending on how the combat is going. Pathfinder 2 is more balanced, which sets you up for actual difficulty. (Which not everyone enjoys.)
It's one of those things that most people accept, if only because it's RPG tradition. "Go and collect 17 kobold spleens and I'll give you a +1 pauldron." Slightly more of a problem when modern RPGs are going from, "Goblins are innately evil," to fleshing them out as a culture. Alternative initial quest: "Kill the goblin chief who has been murdering travellers with some kind of mysterious fire magic." (The adventure as written starts out just telling the players what the goblins' new weapons are, but I find it works better if you hold that back as a secret to discover along the way.)
I've only recruited locally, and the number of applicants is usually about right. If I had too many, then I guess I'd be filtering based on: (a) scheduling / commitment issues, (b) ability to follow instructions and (c) ability to write good prose.
I don't want to have to rework things. I want simple self-contained stat-blocks that are ready to use. The (intended) challenge of the battle comes from the fact that these are four NPC enemies, roughly the same level as the party, with 100% PC WBL in equipment (like a unique sword that stores up energy from hits taken and can release it as a swift action ranged attack, and a Lavender and Green Ellipsoid Ioun Stone which I look up only to find it works similar to a Rod of Absorption, which I also have to look up...). This amount of loot would be potentially game-breaking if it wasn't a final battle so the party never get a chance to use the vast wealth they gain. And then the enemies die in two rounds anyway, because a buffed alchemist and smiting paladin have insane damage output. The problem with shared GM prep is that I like to gather the information I need all in one place. I know what "Heal" does, but I'm less familiar with other spells, so I copy-paste the stat block from the book and insert a little summary of the stuff I might forget: Destruction (Close, 150 damage or 10d6 if pass Fort DC 24) My needs are based around my personal knowledge. Other GMs will have their own needs.
I have now finished my Jade Regent (plus Eastern Journey Adventures, plus Ruby Phoenix Tournament) campaign. It took about 18 months. From this experience, I have learned that Pathfinder expects way too much of a GM. To run a final battle, I have to add about four extra enemies to make things even a little bit challenging. But even to run it as written, I have to look up the stats of the final bosses, the unique powers of three of their items, the powers they get from their archetype, what their spells do... It's too much. They should make a second edition of Pathfinder or something.
I think most d20 players are pretty attached to the basic concept of "slots per day" spellcasting. And I think most GMs would like the classes to be balanced against one another, irrespective of whether you're fighting once a day or ten times, so they don't have to change their narrative just to be fair to martials (or casters). Maybe the least disruptive thing would be to give Fighters (etc) in future editions stamina points (or similar) to spend, to power up their attacks / get extra attacks / inflict status effects. To fight at maximum strength, they would have to spend stamina points at a similar rate to casters burning through their best slots. In this system all characters could go nova to a similar extent, and all characters would have to conserve resources to fight multiple encounters in a day. The main downside would be for players who want to play a simple character that doesn't require any tough decisions...
I forgot there was an older thread about this... It looks like the official timeline is: 4219 Anamurumon is born as a human. He kills the emperor, but is turned into an oni and is condemned to the Penance below the House of Withered Blossoms. 4552 The oni escape the Penance and begin infiltrating Minkai. (According to Book 4.) 4627 Amatatsu Tsutoku (later known as Rokuro Kaijitsu) is born. 4651 The oni escape the Penance and begin infiltrating Minkai. (According to Book 6 - but I think the timeline is more plausible if we use the 4552 date instead.) 4652 The oni, having infiltrated or destroyed every other family, turn their attention on the Amatatsus. The Amatatsus flee. 4652 Akinosa arrives at the House of Withered Blossoms. 4653 The Amatatsus arrive in Kalsgard and sell Suishen. They use the money to establish themselves in Brinewall; later they will move to Magnimar and Sandpoint. 4687 Rokuro return to Brinewall. Lonjiku (his son, Ameiko's father) opens the warding box. The oni arrive. Rokuro dies in Brinewall. Lonjiku survives the sinking of their ships. 4686 The tiefling Soto Takahiro is born. His oni father, Anamurumon, murders Takahiro's mother. 4689 Ameiko is born. 4706 Ameiko barely survives a traumatic adventure involving cannibals in the Fogscar Mountains. 4707 Lonjiku dies (see Rise of the Runelords). 4708 The last emperor, Shigure, takes the throne. One week later, his (weirdly young) bodyguard Soto Takahiro soon betrays him and becomes regent. 4711 Our adventure begins. 4712 (Probably) The party arrives in Minkai.
Question: In Pathfinder 1e, when people were discussing martial-caster disparity, it was common for knowledgeable players to say things like, "Mundane combat isn't the main issue. Of course martials are great at taking attacks and dealing damage. (Though you often need casters to deal with specialist invisible/flying/arrow-repelling enemies.) It's everything else that's the real problem. Out of combat, a Fighter is no better than a commoner, while casters can solve every problem with flight, scrying, teleportation, divining the future, mind control, protection from energy, neutralising poison, raising the dead, triggering traps with summoned monsters, breathing underwater, dispelling magic, creating walls, turning invisible, turning into animals, etc." I don't see many people saying things like that any more. Do people find these issues largely go away with PF2 (due to fewer overpowered spells, modern adventure design, etc.), or does PF2's combat balance make combat ability feel more important in comparison?
My (second) Jade Regent party got the coin, but due to a failed Will save it slipped from their grasp before they could find a way to destroy it. So I had it find its way into the hands of The Raven Prince. He used it to teleport out after attempting a poison shuriken ambush on the party when they showed up to stop the public executions in Kasai. Now they have one more chance to get it back and destroy it, probably by feeding it to Teikono. This is a fairly satisfying narrative resolution to the issues discussed in this thread, but it does require making some minor changes to how it works. Annoyingly, it's a named magic item with abilities that a player would typically Google once its been identified. If any other GMs want to try something like this, I'd suggesting changing the item's name to make it unique to their campaign.
I didn't use the caravan subsystem at all. Even if it's balanced, it's not as interesting as regular combat. (I also dropped all the other subsystems.) There were some good resources for making the big four NPCs more interesting here:
...which, unfortunately, I forgot about and I left it too late to set up long-running character arcs for the NPCs, so once again most of them were pointless. My current thinking is that it works best (for me at least) to rebuild all NPCs that I care about as appropriate companions for the party - simple to run, same level as the party for most of the game, one or two levels behind towards the end. Make sure they're also simple to play - it should be easy for a player to control one in combat. Plan to have one of them following the party on whatever adventure they're on - maybe not the swamp, I like the idea that this is a rite of passage. In Brinewall, leave them behind so the party has room to pick up Kelda or Spivey - I found them more fun to run than the big four. I prefer to develop the NPCs by improvising things for them to say as the party explores, rather than stopping the action to discuss feelings around a campfire. In the end I don't think it's important to give every NPC time in the spotlight. There's too many potential caravan recruits to develop them all without stealing focus from the PCs.
Spell effect (shades [summon monster VIII], summons 1d4+1 quasi-real fiendish dire tigers for 17 rounds, deals only 80% damage to nonbelievers, DC 28 Will save to disbelieve [if interacted with]) Shouldn't that read "20% damage" or "80% less damage"? That's how the spell normally works...
Looking at the bestiary stat blocks for goblins and hobgoblins, it looks like they do have a favored class bonus: the goblin has taken an extra skill point, and the hobgoblin has taken +1 HP. Monsters with no class levels don't have this (based on the one I looked at).
The group met her the first time in her Social Identity... Semi-random GMing note: This is a very good idea. A character is always more memorable if you meet them first in a low-stakes social situation and then again later in a battle or dungeon. Book 2, for example, has multiple characters you could run into in Kalsgard, or on the road before you get there - Lute Haggersly, Goti Runecaster, Thorborg Silverskorr - instead of just sitting in a dungeon waiting for you to rescue / kill them.
You're right. According to the updates, a Tiefling Samurai starts at an age of 20+6d6 years. So to be consistent with the standard rules, he must have become a level 1 Samurai at the (1 in 46,656) minimum age of 26, shortly before the time the party set out in Book 1, then was immediately awarded the position of Emperor's bodyguard, then was immediately appointed Regent, then murdered the Emperor (a level 14 Aristocrat) around the time the party were arriving in Brinewall, then seized the throne and levelled up to 15 over the next few months. Which sounds silly, but the party levelled up that fast, so I can't really say it's impossible...
Nothing prevents a golem from trying to climb out of a pit created by a create pit spell. Note that the Climb rules also list these DC modifiers:
So a large creature effectively gets +10 to climb checks for climbing out of a 10x10 pit.
No. It's a grapple attempt. Grapple attempts don't give saving throws.
One of the players asked how long the Jade Regent had been on the throne. I didn't know. According to this thread the adventure starts in 4711 and the Brinewall massacre happened 25 years ago. The Amatatsus fled Minkai a decade or two before that, I guess? Long enough that they had time to get established as the Kaijitsus. This would have been during a period of turmoil when the oni were assassinating the five families, but before they'd seized power. The Oni escaped the Penance 61 years ago, or maybe hundreds of years ago (Dragon Empires Gazetteer contradicts Brinewall Legacy?). I think in my campaign I said it was 160 years, which sounded like enough time for them to infiltrate the government across the country, have tiefling children, etc. According to book 6, the Jade Regent is only 26 years old, which is a lot younger than I'd assumed until I checked that just now. That's pretty impressive for a tiefling, given that they normally reach adulthood at 60 or so according to the first google result I got... He must have been on the throne for a few(?) years by the time the party arrive, so he would have had to be really young when he became the Emperor's trusted bodyguard and been named as regent. It might be too late for my campaign, but what's your best guess for a sensible timeline for how all this fits together?
Unless of course you are trying to “win” an RPG. Trying to win is just another way to say trying to survive. If you care about your character, and you're faced with the constant threat of TPK, you're incentivised to take advantage of every game mechanic that can aid your survival. "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." Lots of players will cast what they think is the most effective possible spell rather than the most interesting spell, or take advantage of metagame knowledge, because they want to survive. This is just an extreme example of that tendency. In this situation, the GM can remind the players that if they're wasting time in pursuit of hero points, it makes the game less fun for everyone, and that's a sign of bad priorities. It might work. But it's pretty easy to replace mechanics that reward timewasting with ones that reward activities you want to reward. Award hero points after every encounter to the players who role-played the best, or who wasted the least time.
The spell is language-dependent.
If the target cannot understand or hear what the caster of a language-dependent spell says, the spell has no effect So deaf or sleeping people would not be affected, and you can't use it as a combat spell just by asking questions in a language your target doesn't know. Do the rules ever specifically say that by default a save happens right after targeting the creature? I'd assume a save to halve the damage you take would happen if and when you took the damage.
I found the rule some of you mentioned about knowing if someone made a save:
So bluffing not being hurt to the caster is impossible. They'll know you didn't speak the truth because you rolled the save. But you could delay answering, take the damage and then when the spell is no longer in effect say, "All right, I'll talk, the truth is..."
The specific situation I'm looking at is level 13 PCs being hit by Confess from an Inquisitor with Caster Level 5, Sense Motive +18. The damage will be a relatively trivial 2d6, but an opposed Bluff check would be extremely hard for a non-specialist, even without penalties.
You ask the target creature a single question. On the subject’s next action, it must answer truthfully in the same language as the question or take 1d6 points of damage per two caster levels (maximum 5d6) and be sickened for 2d4 rounds. A successful Will save negates the sickening effect and halves the damage. Suppose someone wants to lie despite this having been cast on them, then pretend that they weren't hurt so that their lie would be believed. Are there any rules that cover this? If not, how would you rule it? Bluff skill versus Sense Motive? (Would the amount of damage affect the DC?) What about a Fortitude save?
I had an assassin to trick two PCs (a druid and an alchemist) into drinking Chon Chon Elixir. (People with poison immunity are rarely cautious about such things.) As a result, their heads fell off and their bodies became helpless.
My understanding is that one polymorph effect cancels the previous one, so their heads and bodies were instantly reconnected (somehow). Would you have ruled the same?
Added a mini-adventure to book 5 of Jade Regent after reading about this guy: Jakabu
Got through Book 4 of Jade Regent. I made the tedious final dungeon better by removing half the battles. As a change from linear dungeoneering, I'm thinking of trying to sandbox book 5 by giving the party the general goal of building support for their cause, and I'll improvise ways to make use of the source material provided to work with their plans.
My modifications: (1) Sandru was captured when the caravan battled the hobgoblins, staying behind to collapse a tunnel and prevent pursuit. This creates a vague sense of time pressure, without which the party can just leave the penance to rest whenever they want.
Maybe have Sandru explain to Munasukaru (before she dies) why she was left behind by Anamurumon. Otherwise Munasukaru is another of those NPCs with a potentially interesting backstory that is wasted because the party never learns anything about it...
That suggests that dead creatures wouldn't do bludgeoning damage, but could still do acid damage. Not specified in RAW, but might be a fair ruling. The grapple check to escape would be fairly easy because a helpless creature has an effective DEX of 0 (though it apparently gets to keep its full STR bonus.) But in this case I felt like a Confused PC wouldn't do that.
A giant fish on 0HP swallowed a PC who was suffering from Confusion, then passed out from taking strenuous action while on 0HP. The only not-confused PC was wild-shaped into an orca. This created a whole bunch of rules questions for me. Do you still take the same bludgeoning damage every round while you're swallowed by an unconscious enemy? Can you try to cut your way out as an 'attack nearest enemy' action while you're confused? Is it easier to cut your way out of a foe while it's unconscious?
How would you handle it?
My interpretation on initially reading that rule was that a huge monster with 15-foot reach had to keep going until it was adjacent to the smaller creature, because that was the closest square (to the target), and because it feels more like a charge if it can't stop early due to momentum. That also meant the huge creature couldn't force the smaller creature to provoke in order to engage. I suspect your interpretation is RAI, but I still hate the rule.
The restrictive but ambiguous wording of the Charge rules created the problem. "You must move to the closest space from which you can attack the opponent. If this space is occupied or otherwise blocked, you can't charge."
It's a lot easier to just ignore that bit of the rule...
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